Free health checks

Care Development East offers critical friend “health checks” on any part of your service for which you may either have concerns or where you would simply like to benchmark your service against national good practice measures.

Our “health check” consultant is a very experienced adult social care practitioner and manager, with a large amount of experience at national level. Our consultant will work with you to look at your identified area of concern and benchmark your service against good practice using a range of tools including Progress for Providers. You will then be supported to draw up an improvement plan, which you can put into action.

This service can look at all aspects of your provision including but not restricted to:

Dementia services

Promoting wellbeing and independence

Personalised support / support planning

End of life care provision

Dignity

The consultant will spend one day with you, at your care setting benchmarking your service, and a further half day with you on a one-to-one basis to support you with developing the improvement plan. This service is available to all parts of the adult social care sector and to both private and third sector organisations.

This service is fully funded but we can only fund a certain number each financial year. If you are interested in accessing this service please contact the team at Care Development East as soon as possible to register interest.

How I improved paperwork around risk assessments with a free health check

Lin Barnes is Director and Registered Manager at Christies Care, a family owned and run specialist live-in care agency based in Saxmundham. She used Care Development East's free health check service to enhance and improve her business's risk assessments.

She said: "We wanted to improve our paperwork around risk assessments; we asked for a health check in order to establish our strengths and weaknesses in this area. The report gave us this information and helped in other areas also, and we improved our documentation as a result. The report was written in a way that was very easy to understand.

"When we had our CQC inspection in August 2016, we were able to produce our health check report as evidence of how we had improved our service. If we have a need again for a free health check, we would certainly use it and would recommend it to others. Although the service is free, we would have happily paid for it."